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Why are America's allies so consistently pathetic?

In the unlikely event that I was ever to become persuaded to adopt the Paul/Buchanan isolationist approach to the world, there could only be one possible cause: our pathetic allies.

All take, no give. There are exceptions, of course- allied soldiers fighting and dying alongside ours in the protection of our common security in Afghanistan, for example, or those moments when we merely bear the heaviest part of the load in a collective action like the First Gulf War or Kosovo- but it must be nice to be able to have a nice, lean budget because somebody else will see to your defense needs. And they're ready to badmouth us at the drop of a hat- and yet, when their bacon is in the fire, to whom do they look to pull it out?

Yes, as bizarre, unhistorical and unrealistic as the paleoconservative avoidance of any real foreign policy may be, every time I hear a Canadian or an Englishman or a German or- sacre bleu!- a Frenchman wax snarky about the United States, there is this evil little voice inside me that says that we should abrogate all of our treaties, cancel all our alliances, deal with the world as we jolly well please and let our sometime "friends" go hang.

But then I wake up and realize that while some of them might do exactly that in our place, we're made of different stuff. And I remember the Canadian and British and German friends I have who aren't jerks, whom I am proud to have as friends, and whom I'm glad to think of as allies of my country.

It's just that if we stab our friends in the back, it's generally- not always, but generally- after having shed a lot of blood and squandered a lot of treasure on their behalf first.

Or as an aberration, while being temporarily led by somebody who is clueless.

Ms. Chamberlain, like me, voted for Evan McMullin in November. Like me, she holds no brief for Hillary Clinton or her agenda. But she cannot, as she put it, "throw roses at Hitler."

As I've said before, comparing Trump to Hitler strikes me as harsh. I believe that Trump is a power-hungry narcissist who exhibits disturbing signs of psychopathy, like Hitler. Like Hitler, he has stigmatized defenseless minorities- Muslims and undocumented aliens, rather than Jews- and made them scapegoats for the nation's troubles. Like Hitler, he has ridden a wave of irrational hatred and emotion to power. Like Hitler's, his agenda foreshadows disaster for the nation he has been chosen to lead.

Evan McMullin has devoted most of his post-college life- even to the point of foregoing marriage and a family- to fighting ISIS and al Qaeda and our nation's deadliest enemies as a clandestine officer for the CIA. He has done so at the risk of his life.

He has seen authoritarianism in action close-up. One of his main jobs overseas was to locate and facilitate the elimination of jihadist warlords. Evan McMullin knows authoritarians.

And when he looks at Donald Trump, what he sees is an authoritarian like the ones he fought overseas. He knows Donald Trump. After leaving the CIA he served as policy director for the Republican majority in the United States House of Representatives. He tells about his first encounter with The Donald in that role in this opinion piece he wrote for today's New York Times.

In fact, when Mitt Romney and Tom Coburn and all the others who were recruited to run as a conservative third-party candidate against Trump and Hillary Clinton backed out, McMulli…

This is a great idea for three reasons. First, private enterprise is the future of space exploration, and as far as I know we will be the first spacefaring nation to put most of its eggs in that basket. Second, it's nice to have eggs! Since the Obama administration canceled the Constellation program to develop the Ares booster and the Orion crew vehicle (though it subsequently reinstated the Orion part of the program), the United States has been twiddling its thumbs while China has taken great leaps toward the moon and other countries- including Russia, India, and Japan- have to various degrees intensified their own space programs. It would be both tragic and foolhardy for the nation which first…

Robert Elart Waters

,,,is a retired Lutheran minister who, except for his years in the ministry, has been a lifelong political activist who cannot be ideologically pigeonholed. He is a political independent and Neo-Moderate who believes that the incivility of our political discourse and the extremism and ideological rigidity of both political parties threatens our continued existence as a free people.